Category Archives: category theory

This document is an incomplete draft. About two years ago I wrote about a category-theoretic treatment of collaborative text editing. That post is unique in the history of Bosker Blog in having been cited – twice so far that I know … Continue reading →

Editing text is the opposite of handling exceptions; or, to put it another way, editing text is like exception handling but backwards in time. I realise this is an unexpected claim, so I hope you will permit me to explain. … Continue reading →

Last time, I explained how the category of finite simple games is equivalent to the initial lift-product category. Now I want to show how this fact can be used to find nice ways of representing strategies.

When I started doing research, I mostly worked on categories of games. I even went so far as to write a first-year report that suggested — even confidently claimed — that I would write a thesis on the subject. Well, … Continue reading →

In my previous entry, I deferred the problem of defining lax monoidal functors between radical monoidal categories. But yesterday evening on the train I realised that there is a cute way to think about lax monoidal functors, which makes it … Continue reading →

As you can probably tell, I’m hugely excited about Joachim Kock’s paper. I apologize to those of you who read it a year ago, and think I’m a bit late to the party. Most late-stage PhD students, I imagine, have … Continue reading →

This morning’s crop of arxiv updates included a new version of Joachim Kock’s Elementary remarks on units in monoidal categories. Somehow I hadn’t noticed the earlier version; it’s a beautiful result, and it implies the lemma of mine that I … Continue reading →